LG G5 (Unlocked)

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More »March 18, 2016, 9 p.m.

The LG G5 definitely stands out among high-end smartphones. It's the first semi-modular phone we've tested, letting you remove the bottom portion to add attachments like extra batteries and high-quality music playback units. It's full of unique features, and it works with an array of neat accessories, including an unusually lightweight VR headset and a robot that plays with your cat. Among a sea of similar smartphones, the LG G5 stands out. At least, that's the hope.

This preview is written from a few days' use of a pre-production LG G5. Several software and hardware aspects are potentially not tuned on the phone. After speaking with LG, it sounds like some aspects of the firmware might change in the weeks before the phone hits the market, at some point in April. As such, I'm holding back my final conclusions and rating until I get a chance to test the actual retail model.

Physical Features and NetworkingThe LG G5 is a very slim smartphone, at 5.88 by 2.90 by 0.30 inches (HWD) and 5.61 ounces. It's slightly wider and heavier than the Samsung Galaxy S7 (5.61 by 2.74 by 0.31 inches; 5.36 ounces), in part because of its 5.3-inch, 2,560-by-1,440-pixel LCD, which is the same resolution as the S7's 5.1-inch AMOLED screen. The back of the phone is an attractive matte metal that isn't slippery at all.

I've never been a fan of LG's rear-mounted power and volume buttons, but I feel like it finally gets the formula right on the G5. There's a single, round power button/fingerprint scanner on the back that your finger very naturally fits into. As this is an LG phone, you can also wake up the phone by tapping on the screen. The volume buttons, meanwhile, have migrated back to the side of the device, where they are on most phones. There's a USB-C port on the bottom.

The screen shows time and date, even when the phone is locked. The always-on display is less flashy and also much dimmer than the S7's. There's pretty much no visibility when you aren't looking at it straight on.

I'm not going to talk about call quality right now, although I do that in every actual review of a phone on sale. Call quality is one of the last things to get tuned in a phone, and sometimes it's tuned by the individual carriers that are selling it. Rest assured I'll talk about call quality when we get the final devices.

In testing, general network performance definitely showed that some US carrier tuning is needed. The G5 has the same spectacular, class-leading Wi-Fi performance that the S7 does. But when I put in a T-Mobile SIM card to test network performance, I wasn't as impressed. Compared with a Galaxy Note 5 using a T-Mobile SIM, I found that in weak-signal conditions, the G5 showed slightly worse connectivity than the Note 5, and it took several more seconds to recover from a dead zone.

Modularity and BatteryThe coolest thing about the G5, of course, is how the bottom snaps off. That's not just to slide out the battery; there's also a USB-C interface in there, which lets you attach accessories with new functionality. The two accessories we currently know about are the Cam+ camera grip, which I'll get to below, and a 32-bit DAC (digital-to-analog converter) with an extra headphone jack for listening to high-quality audio, which LG didn't provide for testing. (That said, I've never been able to tell the difference between 24-bit and 32-bit audio.)

The G5's 2,800mAh battery is smaller than the 3,000mAh unit on the Galaxy S7, and the 5.3-inch screen is larger, so it makes sense that the G5 had shorter battery life in our video rundown test, which streams video over LTE at maximum brightness. The G5 got six and a half hours to the S7's nine hours. Both phones last longer than the LG V10and the iPhone 6s, though, which clock in around four and a half hours.

The G5 has a removable battery. It's easy to slide out by pressing a button near the bottom of the phone (and, so far, impossible to do accidentally), and I forsee extended batteries appearing pretty promptly. Adding the Cam+ attachment boosts the battery to 4,000mAh.

Android and PerformanceThe G5 is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 phone, with effectively the same performance as the Samsung Galaxy S7—that is to say, double the performance of last year's phones on many benchmarks. It benchmarked slightly below the S7 in my tests, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt because this is a pre-production model.

The Snapdragon 820 also has Qualcomm's TruSignal antenna tuning mechanism, which resulted in better LTE signal on the Galaxy S7 than on the iPhone 6s. I anticipate the same thing here on the G5, although I found that my G5 spent a bit longer picking up a T-Mobile LTE signal than I would have liked it to. Once again, pre-production.

See How We Test Cell Phones

The G5 runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow. It has some of the typical LG add-ons, such as easy Miracast streaming to TVs, multi-window multitasking, and a quick-screenshot feature that you can scribble on.

But LG has committed what is in my mind a cardinal sin: It got rid of Android's app drawer. Huawei did this a while ago. So did Xiaomi. It's an open copy of Apple's approach to home screens. But in doing so, it drops one of Android's strengths, which is that you don't have to put all the crap on your phone onto a home screen. It absolutely baffles me that LG didn't make this an opt-out feature.

My test phone is a 32GB model, and the system software takes up 8.44GB, slightly less than on the S7. There's a microSD card slot that's part of the SIM card tray, and it takes cards up to 200GB. But—here's something really frustrating—you can't move apps onto the SD card. No way, no how. You can only use it for media. I really hope LG fixes this.

Camera and Cam+Now that all the leading smartphones take perfectly good enough photos in solid light, manufacturers are zigging and zagging to try to differentiate themselves this year. In LG's case, that means adding a whole second camera to the back of the phone, not for 3D, but for wide-angle views.

Yes, it's very much a gimmick, but it's fun and addictive. The second camera is only 8-megapixel (compared with the primary 16-megapixel sensor), but you start to want to take all your photos in wide angle, because you just see so much. It is a fish-eye, though, and the edges of images become severely warped.

I definitely took some blurry photos with this phone, far more than I took with the Galaxy S7. Low-light performance, after some study, isn't all that much to crow about. It falls behind the S7, and is pretty much on par with the iPhone 6s. Shots I took indoors, in low light, often showed serious smoothing and some blur, as the G5's main camera collects less light than the S7's amped-up 12-megapixel sensor. Focus time is also longer in low light than the Galaxy S7.

Dig deeper, and there's a whole new set of camera modes. Manual mode gives you virtual ISO, white balance, point focus, RAW recording, and most notably shutter speed. That last bit is frequently missing from phone cameras, and can make the difference between a blurry photo and a clear one. You can change the aspect ratio of your photos, but not the resolution. For video, you can record at 4K, 1080p, or 720p, but always at 30 frames per second.

Multi-View mode creates a collage of photos taken with the front and back cameras. Snap lets you assemble a 60-second video from several clips, presumably for Snapchat. And Popout uses both of the rear cameras to create a picture-in-picture effect.

As mentioned earlier, my G5 came with a Cam+ attachment, a camera grip that snaps onto the bottom of the phone and gives you an extended battery and a bunch of dedicated camera keys. It makes launching the camera faster, although you can customize the phone's lock screen to include a camera shortcut. It comes in most handy when you're trying to shoot photos with one hand, as the dual-detent, physical shutter button means you no longer have to fumble with the screen. But the lumpy grip and extra battery made it a bit difficult to slip the G5 into my pocket with the attachment in place.

ConclusionsThe LG G5 was the most innovative of the phones we saw at Mobile World Congress this year, thanks to its expandability. I really like the idea of being able to snap on new functionality, especially bigger batteries.

That said, I'm hoping to see various things tuned before the final version arrives. Most notably, I'd like to see improved low-light camera performance, which is absolutely possible (I remember seeing some shocking improvements between firmware versions on HTC phones, once upon a time). I'm also turned off by LG removing some key Android features, such as the app drawer and the ability to move apps to your memory card.

All this may change by the time the G5 hits shelves in April. With the right tuning, LG could have a serious contender on its hands. I'm looking forward to seeing the official model next month.